Be this as it may, the time has surely come for all educated English Churchmen to cease to gird at monks and nuns, or to sneer at the vowed life; for it is to such as these that England owes its conversion to the Faith, whether we think of the Celtic missionaries from the North, or of St. Augustine and his forty companions from the South--all trained in the “School of the Divine Service.” [A] Those who wish to see this exceedingly rare book for themselves, and to read other particulars of the last abbot, may like to know that there is a copy at the British Museum, press-mark 600, _b_, 47. CHAPTER IX CONCLUDING WORDS Altogether apart from the outrageously scandalous way in which the suppression of the English monasteries was carried out--a fact that any historian worth his salt is now bound to admit--it is a wholesome sign of the times to find that English Churchmen are gradually coming round to a general acceptance of the religious and social blessings that came to this country through monasticism during the many centuries in which it played so important a part in the national life. This is certainly the estimate formed by those amongst us who study the history of the vowed religious life with sober devoutness. There are few churchmen of the immediate past whose judgments can be followed with more implicit trust than the late Dean of St. Paul’s; and there are none among our living churchmen, who, from patient research, are more capable of uttering a reliable opinion on monasticism than the present Dean of Durham. Dr. Church penned a beautiful and comprehensive chapter on the discipline of a Norman monastery in his _Life of St. Anselm_. From it we borrow a single paragraph: “In an age when there was so much lawlessness, and when the idea of self-control was so uncommon in the ordinary life of man, the monasteries were schools of discipline; and there were no others. They upheld and exhibited the great, then almost the original, idea, that men needed to rule and govern themselves; that they could do it, and that no use of life was noble and perfect without this ruling. It was hard and rough discipline, like the times, which were hard and rough. But they did good work then, and for future times, by impressing on society the idea of self-control and self-maintained discipline. And crude as they were, they were capable of nurturing noble natures, single hearts, keen and powerful intellects, glowing and unselfish affections.” Dean Kitchin, when commenting on the division of administration among the obedientiaries or office-holding monks of St. Swithun’s, writes: